I don’t know if other poets have this fear, but if they do not, I reason it will only increase the anguish of the outcome if it one day passes into being. To pass into being—now there’s a fear no one ever had. No one ever feared being born, even when all those responsible for the event were fraught with fear for the unborn. And if I may segue to a child at the age of four, I recall watching her beingapproached by a dog that was, well, much larger than the girl herself. The girl’s face was astonishing to watch. It was completely elastic and changed from an expression of wonder and glee: Please come to me doggie and we shall play oh what happiness to be approached by you—to—in less than ten seconds—an expression of sheer terror: Fear! fear! doggie will eat me up and mommie is far away. As the dog slowly crossed the room, in what could not have been more than two minutes, the girl’s face changed expressions so many times I gave up counting. As she oscillated between feeling secure and insecure, it struck me that her face would probably continue to change, albeit at a slower rate, every time she was approached by a dog for the next couple of years, one day coming to rest on that expression that was likely to signify forever after how this human being felt about dogs.

I was walking the wastelands left by strip mining. A decade before I was born the flat, fertile prairie had been torn asunder.  Steep hills now surrounded deep ponds and muddy bogs.

The destruction of the land had softened over time. Slag heaps were hidden beneath tall grasses.  Rain, snow, freezing and thawing had broken the soft rock of the ancient seabed leaving narrow valleys scattered with milky mica, iron pirate glittering in the sun, and fossils of fabulous creatures.

Barely three miles from home, a twelve-year-old became Kit Carson or Stanley searching for Livingston or, in one Thanksgiving blizzard, Robert Peary making for the North Pole.

My dog Cleo and I were above "Dead Cows" (sensibly named for dozens of cattle skeletons stuck in the mud) when movement caught my eye.  He (even at this distance, almost certainly he) was carefully choosing a path across the flooded bottom-land.  Willows quivered as he grasped one then another to steady his step.

I had thrown myself flat against the ground on first glimpse, holding Cleo tight against my left side. But then from, maybe, thirty feet above and sixty yards distance I decided this was a friend coming to find me.

"Mark! Mark!", I stood and waved.  But the voice that replied with one indecipherable sound was deeper than any twelve-year-old.  This was not Mark.

I turned and ran as fast as I could, pine bows slapping my face as I raced through the woods, stumbling over rocks, sliding down flinty hillsides. The deeper, the darker, the better.

On the ridge over Dead Cows I was at the edge of my known universe. It was my purpose that day to explore toward sunrise.

I now know the original meaning of explore is "to cry out" or "to flow out".  I rushed into the unknown in a blur of green and moist earth spongy beneath my sprint.  When finally I paused to take a deep breath I was, except for Cleo's asking brown eyes, surrounded by the unknown.